Romney has big advantages over his rivals, but they will be coming after him

By
David M. Shribman

http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
So now there is a front-runner. By virtue of mathematics (the money he has raised) and chemistry (the way his rivals treat him), former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts is the leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination.

There's danger in that position. The GOP field didn't gang up on Mr. Romney in their New Hampshire debate last week, but that's only because many of the candidates are just getting their campaign legs and are breathing the sweet air of being in presidential politics for the first time.

Once they feel their political survival is at stake, their restraint will disappear, and one after another they will send arrows Mr. Romney's way. Those arrows will provide opportunities for fellow contenders -- and will challenge Mr. Romney's mettle, providing evidence that he is strong enough to engage President Barack Obama in the general election or raising questions about his suitability as the party nominee.

Sometimes front-runners stumble. Democrat Gary Hart did in 1988, for example, but Mr. Hart's fall was more a matter of personal conduct than political profile.

Mr. Hart was in many ways ideally suited for his party at the end of the Reagan era. He was a Westerner, an apostle of new ideas, no stranger to military issues, nimble in debates and stentorian on the stump. His fall, after an apparent affair with a young woman, was one of the political benchmarks of the era, removing the press's hesitancy to examine the personal lives of politicians and postponing the Democrats in their effort to sculpt a new image for themselves.

Despite the perils in leading the pack, though, it's a lot better to be the front-runner than one of the other contenders. More often than not, front-runners prevail and win their party's nomination: Walter F. Mondale in 1984, George H.W. Bush in 1988, Robert J. Dole in 1996, George W. Bush and Albert Gore Jr. in 2000 are among many examples.

This pattern is particularly strong among Republicans, who, at least in presidential politics, are temperamentally more inclined to respect customary lines of authority and the prerogatives of party elders. Three of their last four elected presidents were respected party figures who had run for the White House before and the fourth (George W. Bush) was the son of a president, the grandson of a senator, the brother of a governor and himself the governor of the largest state headed by a Republican. Indeed, every Republican nominee for the past four decades, with the exception of Mr. Bush and Gerald R. Ford, an appointed but incumbent president, had run for president before.

This factor, along with Mr. Romney's bulging campaign treasury and the deference the other candidates displayed last week, underlines Mr. Romney's position -- a position so commanding that he actually outpolled Mr. Obama in the latest Washington Post/ABC News Poll. Indeed, Mr. Romney has more than four times as much support in New Hampshire as his nearest rival, former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who isn't even in the race (yet).

New Hampshire is vital for Mr. Romney, who owns a vacation home in the state and whose primary residence is in a neighboring state. His defeat there four years ago at the hands of Sen. John McCain represented a substantial repudiation, as Massachusetts politicians from John F. Kennedy's time on have prevailed in New Hampshire -- including Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge (1964), who didn't even campaign and managed to beat Sen. Barry Goldwater and Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller in a remarkable write-in effort, and former Sen. Paul E. Tsongas (1992). The only exception, besides Mr. Romney, was Edward M. Kennedy, who was defeated by an incumbent president, Jimmy Carter, in 1980.

This time Mr. Romney simply cannot afford to lose the state, especially since he has all but abandoned efforts in Iowa, whose caucuses will precede New Hampshire's primary by eight days. He can explain away a loss in Iowa: He won't have competed and the contest there is shaping up as a social-conservatism derby that is not to his tastes nor to his strengths. But losing New Hampshire, where he is well-known and where conditions favor him, would be fatal to his presidential hopes -- especially since South Carolina, another social-conservative state, is likely to hold the next primary.

Mr. Romney was stung in Iowa in 2008 by former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas, which was bad enough, but losing in his home region to Mr. McCain five days later was too much for his campaign to absorb.

The big talk in the last days of spring is the way former Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota linked Mr. Obama's health care plan, which is anathema to Republicans, to Mr. Romney's plan in Massachusetts by speaking of "Obamneycare." Mr. Pawlenty used the word again at the debate Monday at St. Anselm College, but its long-term effect may be to elevate Mr. Romney into a political if not moral equivalent of the president -- not the sort of tactic that always benefits a challenger.

The health care issue underlines Mr. Romney's biggest task, which is to counter the notion that he is willing to change his views with the political breezes. His opponents believe he supported legalized abortion and a health care plan in Massachusetts because the political atmosphere in the state demanded it, and that he abandoned those views once he ascertained that the national political atmosphere required him to do so. Then again, he is being pilloried for his failure to change his mind on global warming.

The result is a political conundrum for Mr. Romney as great as any front-runner has had since Mr. Mondale was tarred as being the instrument of traditional Democratic special interests, especially organized labor. If Mr. Romney adjusts his position on global warming, he will be declared an opportunist. If he doesn't, he will be at odds with a major tenet of the modern Republican creed.

Right now Mr. Romney is determined to assure that Republicans don't change their minds. He has the biggest advantage in the Gallup poll any Republican contender has possessed in the race. That margin will shrink. The story of the 2012 Republican presidential nomination fight will be how much it shrinks, at what rate it shrinks and whether it disappears. Such is the advantage and the danger of front-runner status.

David Shribman, a Pulitzer Prize winner in journalism, is executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Previously:

06/06/11One question each
05/30/11 The 14-week challenge
05/23/11 Delay tactics
05/16/11 Republicans are waiting
05/09/11 Bin Laden is dead. What does it mean?
05/02/11 From nobodies to nominees
04/25/11 The founders left slavery for future generations to settle, and we still haven't fully come to terms with it
04/18/11 From audacious to cautious
04/11/11 Dreaming of space
12/12/10 The GOP takes control
12/06/10 DECEMBER 7
11/29/10 GOP presidential hopefuls already are lining up local supporters in what is now a red state
11/22/10 Burning down the House
11/15/10 Institutions of higher learning are finally beginning to teach important lifeskills
11/04/10 The war has just begun
11/01/10 Echoes of a speech 40 years ago this week still resonate today
10/25/10 50 years ago America chose between two men who were dramatically different --- and eerily similar